Posts Tagged ‘teachers’

In 1993 Adam Robinson, Co-founder of the Princeton Review, wrote a book called What Smart Students Know. The remarkable thing about this book is that it shows students (and anyone interested in learning) how to take full control of their education.

For me, mindmapping is like that. With mindmapping you take control of information and manipulate, reuse, and visually represent it anyway you like.

Similarly, this book is about taking control of your education. As Adam Robinson put it, “I wrote it to show you how to improve your grades by mastering an entirely new way to learn.” Think about that: “…an entirely new way to learn.”

Many of us believe that a teacher teaches us. But learning is not determined by the teacher, it is determined by the student. If the student is active and engaged, the student will learn from the teacher.

But if the student is distracted and not engaged, the teacher will teach, but the student will not learn.

What is so remarkable and “new” about Adam Robinson’s book is that he shows the student how to leverage techniques, strategies, and approaches that enable them to learn – with or without a teacher. He shares these empowering strategies through 12 principles.

I created a mindmap to capture these 12 principles and what they mean. If they resonate for you, pick up the book immediately and read it. If they don’t, by all means find something that causes you to be an active learner and not a passive observer. In the end, we have to find resources that work for us. As someone who did well in high school, college, and graduate school, I can tell you from personal experience – these principles worked for me.

Click on the mindmap to enlarge and read the 12 principles:

If you have MindManager 7 or the MindManager Viewer 7 (which is a free download) you can view the notes that are a part of this mindmap. I encourage you to download this mindmap and read the informative notes by Adam Robinson on each principle.

The MindManager file (.mmap) for this mindmap is available for download at biggerplate.com. Click here to download.

In an earlier post, I highlighted Mead Map as a great resource for students. But this same site offers great benefits for teachers as well. As a teacher on the high school or college level, you have to put together lesson plans/syllabus, organize student work, handle school administrative activities, and do research. Mead Map can help with all of this. And if you provide online assistance to your students, you can collaborate “real-time” with them over the web.

Here are few ways teachers can use Mead Map. Click on the mindmaps to enlarge:

To start organizing and visualizing all of your work, go to the Mead Map site today. You can try it out for free for 30 days! Click here.